Blakeney on Sánchez (2025)

Gonzalo J. Sánchez’s Contested Visions focuses on a small set of depictions of the experience of political imprisonment by a group of practicing artists from the French Revolution to the 1890s. The book brings together an interesting corpus of works by trained artists representing first-hand experiences of political imprisonment in nineteenth-century France, a useful addition to an unfortunately small body of works of art and literature made by, rather than simply about, prisoners. Sánchez argues that this corpus demonstrates the impact of an increasingly “panoptic” mode of incarceration, which established a new “scopic regime” that made a depiction of the prison difficult for artists, often forcing them to incorporate words in their drawings of prison life. The chapters are mostly organized chronologically, focusing on artists from the French Revolution to l’Ère des attentats in the 1890s, including Hubert Robert, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet, Armand Gautier, and a coterie of artists exiled or imprisoned after the Commune and l’Ère des attentats. Two interstitial chapters treat changes in the French carceral system after 1848 and descriptions of prisoner graffiti in works by prison officials and criminologists.

The visual texts are read through the lens of a broad historical narrative, the “transformation of the ersatz structures such as convents, schools, hospitals, and military barracks […] into individualized and rationalized panopticons on behalf of progress” (6). The book claims that this change has a deep effect on the visual possibilities afforded to prisoners seeking to represent their experiences. However, this narrative is oversimplified, and the central term “panopticon” is used in a problematic way: it was not a major concept in prison reform of nineteenth century France. The author frequently equates the cellular model advocated by French reformers with more extreme models like Bentham’s panopticon and the Pennsylvanian system, a model of total isolation that even many advocates for “cellular reform” in France found abhorrent. These modifications were in fact not put into widespread practice until late in the century, and the idea of cellular isolation has remained a myth throughout most of French history into the present, when prisons are so overcrowded that cells meant for two prisoners sometimes hold eight. If in practice French prisoners were never subjected to a “panoptic” system, then it is hard to accept the notion that these artists’ choices were driven by this new “scopic regime.”

The visual materials Sánchez has gathered offer the reader rare access to prisoners’ point of view on their own experiences. Unfortunately, rather than taking the visual materials produced in and around prisons as an opportunity to add further nuance to our understanding of the variegated carceral system in nineteenth-century France, in many chapters the author largely relies instead on secondary sources to establish the narrative of the progressive transformation of French prisons into “pantopicons.” While this narrative sometimes fits the experiences of his subjects, at other moments it is imposed on the visual texts in spite of clear evidence (often in the drawings themselves) that France’s prisons strayed far from the panoptic model and allowed prisoners forms of limited mobility and community. Most egregiously, Sánchez claims at the beginning of the chapter on the Commune that the prison reforms discussed in the previous chapter impacted imprisoned communards (95), even though the sources for that chapter were almost all drawn from the Third Republic.

Indeed, the text’s presentation of the carceral system includes several significant errors and lacunae which make its broader claims less credible. Despite noting the “crucial semantic differences” between the terms jail and prison (1), Sánchez consistently conflates the two, as when he writes, “The prison has always been resistant to visual creativity for reasons other than administrative: closed in on itself, a space to be watched over, the jail is a locale of interiority, a self-scape where the theatrum mundi is the self rather than its surroundings" (3). And in a fragmentary chapter entirely devoted to the bagnes coloniaux, the penal colony is presented as a novel technology arising after 1848, without mention of the bagnes métropolitains that had existed since the 17th century.

The strongest parts of the book are Sánchez’s interesting readings of the visual works themselves. However, Contested Vision frequently suffers from insufficient contextualization of the work within the artist’s broader œuvre and from a lack of attention to its genre. Is it particularly likely that Daumier incorporates words into his illustrations of prison life as a response to the narrowing possibilities of visual representation, given that his work was often conceived in a dynamic relationship to captions or other texts and, more importantly, frequently did include words when representing other subjects? Armand Gautier’s illustrations of prison life, which are presented on the same piece of paper as long strings of text, appear differently when viewed alongside Delacroix’s strikingly similar sketchbooks from Morocco, which also integrate text and image on the same page.

The strength of some of the readings is also undercut by the author’s florid prose, which at times inhibits the readers’ ability to follow the argument. Particularly perplexing is the author’s use of the term “ekphrastic,” which refers in this book not to descriptions of artistic works in writing but to the incorporation of text within images. Although this usage is quite unconventional (the deployment of the term “ekphrastic image” differs significantly from earlier uses of the term as in W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay on ekphrasis, for example), Sánchez does not situate his study sufficiently within the rich body of scholarship on ekphrasis or text-image relations more broadly, giving instead to a list of references that in fact contradict his own use of the term. 

Ultimately, in spite of presenting a compelling corpus, this book cannot be recommended because of the flaws in its argument and the contextualization of its sources.